EU Awards €180 Million Sovereign Cloud Contract to Four European Providers
April 17, 2026 - 9:59 am
Post Telecom (with CleverCloud and OVHcloud), StackIT, Scaleway, and Proximus (with S3NS, a Thales – Google Cloud joint venture, plus Clarence and Mistral) have won the European Commission’s six-year sovereign cloud framework contract. The Proximus consortium’s inclusion signals that non-European technology can qualify as ‘sovereign’ under the Commission’s framework if operated within a sufficiently strict governance structure.
The European Commission has awarded its €180 million sovereign cloud tender to four European provider groups, closing a procurement process launched in October 2025. This will allow EU institutions, bodies, offices, and agencies to purchase sovereign cloud services for up to six years. The four winners are:
- Post Telecom, partnering with CleverCloud and OVHcloud;
- StackIT (the cloud brand of German retail giant Schwarz Group);
- Scaleway (the French cloud subsidiary of Iliad Group);
- Proximus, partnering with S3NS – a joint venture between French defence and technology group Thales and Google Cloud, alongside Clarence and Mistral AI.
Decision to Award Four Contracts
The decision to award four contracts in parallel is deliberate. The Commission structured the outcome to ensure diversification and resilience, avoiding over-reliance on a single provider. Each winner was assessed against the Commission’s Cloud Sovereignty Framework, which measures sovereignty across eight objectives: strategic, legal, operational, environmental considerations, supply chain transparency, technological openness, security, and compliance with EU law.
Proximus–S3NS Consortium Inclusion
The most politically significant element of the award is the inclusion of the Proximus–S3NS consortium. S3NS is a joint venture in which Thales holds a controlling stake and Google Cloud provides the underlying infrastructure, meaning one of the four awarded sovereign cloud contracts will run on technology ultimately owned by an American company.
The Commission addressed this directly, stating that "non-European technologies, when operated within a strict and appropriate framework, can meet the minimum level of sovereignty required." This is a significant policy statement: it draws a line between sovereign ‘operation’ and sovereign ‘technology’, concluding that the former can compensate for the latter if the governance controls are sufficient.
Reactions and Implications
CISPE, the European cloud providers’ trade association, had warned before the award that the Cloud Sovereignty Framework’s scoring methodology could produce precisely this outcome. The remaining three winners are fully European-owned. Post Telecom is Luxembourg’s state-owned telecoms operator; its partners CleverCloud (a French platform-as-a-service provider) and OVHcloud (France’s largest cloud company) bring technical depth to the consortium. OVHcloud has separately been chosen as a subcontractor on the ECB’s digital euro project and already held a prior Commission contract.
StackIT is operated by Schwarz Digits, the technology arm of German retail giant Schwarz Group.